4 Feb
2021
4 Feb
'21
11:43 a.m.
On Sat, 30 Jan 2021, Larry McVoy wrote:
[ Usual insightful... insights ]
If you like ZFS you don't understand operating
systems design. I do.
Indeed...
Jeff Bonwick was a stats student at Stanford when he
took my OS class, I
convinced him to come to Sun. Bill Moore worked for me. That's the two
main ZFS guys and I thought I had taught them well but they let me down.
{ ... ]
There's no way that I'd use ZFS; lose a block in an ordinary file, well,
you now have a hole (but not in the file-system sense); lose a block in a
compressed system, well...
Or perhaps I'm becoming conservative in my old age; I remember when I once
rewrote utilities that when writing a zero block merely did a seek instead
(or something like that; you had to remember to actually write out the
last block). I wouldn't try it these days, as Unix file systems were
simple back then.
[ ... ]
Let's try it this way. Get back to me when you
can show me 40 people
who have installed FreeBSD on their own, with no help. In the same
time, I can show you 40,000 people who have installed Linux on their
own, with no help. Probably 400,000.
Well, I did (but without ZFS) on several boxes, with zero help. Having
had SunOS experience (4.4 was the best) helped :-)
I can't stand Penguin/OS; it looks too much like Windoze for my liking
(and does its best to be almost-Unix-but-not-quite).
-- Dave, a grey-beard